Instructors
Emma Griffiths is a research associate at the Centre for Infectious Disease Genomics and One Health (CIDGOH) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her work focuses on developing and implementing ontologies and data standards for public health and food safety genomics to help improve data harmonization and integration. She is a member of the Standards Council of Canada and leads the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE) Data Structures Working Group.
Finlay Maguire is a jointly appointed Assistant Professor in Community Health & Epidemiology and Computer Science at Dalhousie University and Pathogenomics Bioinformatics Lead at the Shared Hospital Laboratory. His lab primarily works on developing and applying novel microbial bioinformatics and machine learning approaches to better understand the diagnosis, evolution, and dynamics of infectious diseases. This includes active projects on antimicrobial resistance, outbreak control, and characterisation of novel zoonoses in both clinical and public health contexts. Beyond this, he also engages in a broad range of collaborative data science projects in the areas of computational social science and clinical epidemiology.
Fiona Brinkman, PhD FRSC, is an SFU Distinguished Professor associated with the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, with cross appointments with the School of Computing Science and Faculty of Health Sciences, at Simon Fraser University. The Brinkman lab has been developing bioinformatic resources to better track infectious diseases using genomic data, and improve prediction of new vaccine/drug targets. Her aim is to develop more holistic, sustainable, integrated approaches for infectious disease control, however she is also applying her methods, in particular integrative analyses and database development, to aid child health and environmental research.
B.F. Francis Ouellette is currently consulting in bioinformatics. Francis co-founded the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) and the Scientific Director of bioinformatics.ca from 1998 to 2022. His research interests included biological sequence analysis, genome annotation and database curation. Francis has dedicated his career to Open Science: the data it generates, how bioinformatics is thought and the publications that report them throughout his career and through his work with the CBW and the many scientific advisory and editorial boards he serves on.
Gabriela is a MSc student in computer sciences at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Fanny Chevalier at the Dynamic Graphics Project, and Dr. Anna Goldenberg’s lab at SickKids Hospital. Her research is grounded in understanding human factors in the design of data- and data-visualization systems in healthcare. She has designed analytics interfaces in both industry and academic settings, and develops tooling in the form of R packages to increase understanding and ease of application of findings through interactive visualizations of the relationships between models and their clinical contexts.
Gary Bader is a Professor at The Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto and an expert in Computational Biology. The Bader lab is developing computational methods and an ecosystem theory of tissue function that considers cell-cell interactions, cell growth, and cell internal mechanisms, such as pathways, reactions, and causal relationships, to help understand development, cancer and regenerative wound healing processes.
Dr. Gary Van Domselaar, Ph.D. (University of Alberta, 2003) is the Section Chief for Bioinformatics at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada and Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Van Domselaar’s lab develops methods and pipelines to understand, track, and control circulating infectious diseases in Canada and globally. His research and development activities span metagenomics, infectious disease genomic epidemiology, genomic surveillance, genome annotation, population structure analysis, and microbial genome-wide association studies.
Gregory develops and implements clinical genomic tests focusing on molecular profiling of tumour specimens for Toronto General Hospital and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. His PhD from the University of Guelph explored the maize developmental transcriptome, showing how patterns of co-regulation can help us to understand the function of unannotated genes.
Dr. Schwartz is a Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. He has developed several methodologies for mutation detection, data integration, and cellular population visualization to understand cancer heterogeneity and diverse responses to anti-cancer therapies. His current research involves integrating multi-omic information and leveraging single-cell resolution to identify underlying mechanisms of drug resistance in cancer.